Some people call women who have failed miserably at motherhood or who have started evil things because of their rejection of motherhood fathers. This infuriates me! The opposite of mother is not father! On the contrary, while we live in a society that downplays men and fathers as loafs. Just look at sitcoms and commercials! We need to reclaim the word father and begin to up build men in their role as fathers or future fathers.

There is one woman in particular that serves as a perfect example for this cultural phenomenon of degrading fatherhood and the term father. It's Margaret Sanger, the founder of the Planned Parenthood. Those who (rightfully) despise the work she has done call her the "father of the Planned Parenthood and modern contraception" because she rejected her motherhood. They say that she "fathered" the abortion movement, and therefore should be called a father.

However, a father is someone who brings forth a blessing (new life) and then cares for the child and his/her mother through his service and self-sacrifice. Nothing about promoting abortion reminds me of the role of fathering, and therefore, that term should not be used.

One of Margaret Sanger's contemporaries and heroes was Adolf Hitler who founded Nazism and killed millions of people because of his eugenic agenda. Sanger held just the same eugenics agenda, however she implemented different means to destroy the lives of those that she felt were lesser human beings. Nonetheless, it's the same agenda. But, do we call Hitler the "mother" of Nazism? No! The feminists as well as all mothers would be up in arms! Yes, he rejected his call to be a man and a father who would normally protect life, not destroy it. But, his rejection of that call does not make him a mother or anything close; it makes him a man who failed at understanding his calling as a male.

Let's reclaim the use of the word "father!" We need to be constantly uplifting men and uplifting the idea of fatherhood. To use "father" as a sort of curse word only feeds society's obsession with undercutting men and their dignity.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

A 2006 headline from Brazil read "Women are worried about birth control and domestic violence" The article goes on to say that this is the opinion of Zuleica Albuquerque, national adviser to the Family and Food and Nutritional Security Unit of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO). Well, that certainly doesn't sound like what women want, but what is one woman's agenda.

Albuquerque states that access to artificial contraceptives is "especially for poorer women in more remote areas," Let's not forget that Albuquerque's goals sound much like the on-going agenda of the Planned Parenthood: eugenics.

It is quite misleading to claim that women want to have birth control imposed on them. Furthermore, Albuquerque calls for empowering of women against abuse. But, can't birth control be considered abuse? Men get to expect unlimited sex from women without regard for her health or the natural consequences of sex, children.

If we look at the observations of well-known population and contraception researcher Steven Mosher on Mexican women and the priority of contraception, we can see that women actually aren't desperate for birth control access! In fact, it ranked lowest amongst their concerns, which included potable water, vaccinations and spousal and child abuse. Learning about Natural Family Planning ranked fourth on the list! Yet, this is the one area of female health that birth control advocates, in the name of reproductive health care, refuse to address!

Mosher states:

The single most striking result of the survey was the dismal showing of Reproductive Health. This category of health care, defined as the limitation of childbearing by means of contraception and sterilization, came in dead last. The Mexican women we surveyed would prefer almost any kind of health care to the kind of "either-IUD-or-Ligation" programs that they have been force-fed the past few decades.

Many proponents of family planning will view these results as contradictory. They will ask how the Mexicans can praise Natural Family Planning on the one hand, while condemning reproductive health care on the other. They will maintain that the two family planning methods are merely different means to the same (i.e., anti-natal) end? They will be wrong.

As it turns out, the people of Mexico have a far better understanding of the differences between Natural Family Planning and reproductive health care than the controllers. And they vastly prefer a method over which they have intimate control-NFP-- to the permanent, or semi-permanent methods imposed by the National Population Council and the U.N. Population Fund.

Let's start to give women, children and families what they really need: care! Not coercion and societal suicide!

Friday, January 20, 2012

When surveys highlight the reasons women have abortions, they often forget to look at why she was pregnant to begin with.

Year after year, the Guttmacher Institute statistics reveal that half of women getting abortions are using some type of birth control in the month they became pregnant. That means half of women get abortions because they were using birth control. Why are they pregnant? Birth control is failing our women. Our society is failing our women.

How often do we hear the constant mantra of birth control? "It's responsible," they say. "It's necessary; it's effective; don't forget to use it!" We hear this all too often through the media, from our physicians, from our friends and neighbors, etc.

If we are hearing so much about these products, but women still get pregnant while using them, why do people still insist on promoting them? And, why is the next "responsible choice" an abortion? Why do we justify or promote murder as the solution to product failure?

The US Supreme Court knew what they were saying in the 1994 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey,:

[F]or two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. (505 US 833, 856)

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Waiting for my hair stylist Saturday morning, I began thumbing through the latest issue of Runner's World. I'm a new runner, having just completed a three minute run. Yeah, that's three minutes, not three miles.

But something besides technique tips caught my attention. It was the story of Ugandan Olympic runner Julius Achon who in 2003 discovered eleven homeless, orphaned children sleeping beneath a city bus in his hometown of Lira, Uganda. He immediately brought the children to his parents' home and fed them lunch. There was but one bowl in the home, so the children patiently waited their turn.

Tough Achon lived in Portugal at the time on a salary of $3,000 a year, he promised to send his father $1,200 a year to house and feed the children and to send them to school.

What does Achon have to say about children?

In Uganda, he observed dryly, housing standards were not the same as in the United States—or as he put it: "If you are poor in Uganda, you just sleep on the ground like the cows." Childcare was also no problem, since children contributed to household chores and tended to be well-behaved. "As long as there is enough food, they are easy to mind," he said. And while accepting responsibility had been daunting, he admitted, his time in the United States and Portugal had cast the financial obligation in sharp relief. "I calculated: If these 11 kids stay, for $100 a month I could feed all of them," he said with a shrug. "When I realized that, there was no other decision."

The runner now lives in the United States with his wife and baby, but returns to Uganda twice a year to visit his father and the eleven orphans.